Battery Life and Charging

I still believe one of the most important factors for a smartphone is how it fares in battery life testing. We’re going to revamp the entire testing suite in early 2012, but until then, the 710 gets the 2011 treatment like all other devices to date. Those three corners are a series of page loading tests with the display set as close to 200 nits as we can get it on both WiFi, and cellular data (in this case, WCDMA 3G). In the case of Windows Phone, the lack of an analog slider for brightness does force us to use the “HIgh/Medium/Low” presets instead, which can make comparison a challenge. The third corner of our battery life test is a call time test, where we simply place a call between the device under test and another line, and play music at both ends until the battery dies.

Unfortunately, the Lumia 710’s smaller battery doesn’t do it any favors in our battery testing. On cellular data, the Lumia is indeed ahead of the Focus, and right behind the Venue Pro which we also tested on T-Mobile, but still doesn’t last very long by comparison with some of the other major devices. WiFi page loading also shows a strange little departure from the Lumia’s positive performance, though I can’t verify that the Lumia 710 likewise uses a BCM4329. Call time evens out performance between the two Lumias, but I wager again that we’re just seeing the battery size differences between the two at this point.

On a more positive note, the Lumia 710 doesn’t have any of the charging or battery reporting issues that the Lumia 800 had. The 710 charges speedily enough, and doesn’t get stuck in a pre-boot environment - unable to draw current or charge - like I saw the 800 do when deeply discharged. On that note, the 710 also includes the same diagnostics menu which can be accessed by dialing ##634#, and the interesting/realtime current draw display.

Post Your Comment

48 Comments

The Nokia Luma710 isn't the "midrange" product for Nokia. The 800 is the "midrange" product and they haven't announced their high end product for the US yet. I do agree that Nokia doesn't make too much sense right now but at the same time I don't exactly own a successful phone manufacturing company.Reply

Yup, you did some good editing for better accuracy. Only people who are up on their Windows Phones news knows that Nokia actually gave a statement saying they didn't release the Lumia 800 in the US because they wanted to make sure they released a proper high end phone to compete in the market over here. Also, they wanted to establish a base and buzz in the rest of the world with the Lumia 800 where they still have phones in the hands of their consumers.Reply

In the US it's all about the high end,the consumer is quite a different beast from most other places and to be fair the price difference is pretty small.Why T-Mo and the 710? Nokia most likely has better relations with T-Mo than with the other US carriers so it was easier to bring the device to market fast and they didn't wanted to give a higeher end device to the smallest of the big 4 or maybe nobody was interesting in heavily subsidizing the 800.As for the device itself i'm not sure it's a better buy than the HTC Radar 4G.For the ecosystem,it's hard to have faith in Microsoft,they are slow and afraid to innovate,the Windows brand doesn't have the best image and the first steps towards an OS unification are not great.Win 8 might be Vista 2 for traditional PC users.If they don't let us disable the Metro UI on desktops, i know i won't upgrade to Win8,don't need the extra bloat. They'll keep trying to buy their way in,just like they are doing with Bing ( terrible search engine BTW and i use it often) but they need to do better to actually succeed.Reply

u really just sound like u have a grudge towards microsoft now... i've used the dev preview, i admit its not that great for keyboard/mouse use but definitely works wonders once you get touch screen, but thats only the dev preview and ms said they would do something about it (otoh, the new task manager is great)

now about innovation, xbox was definitely innovative, wp7/zune dont get enough credit they are some of the the most innovative product as well, sky drive is fantastic now with the new update and fix they have in place (still hate the 100mb file limit though...)

Microsoft isn't the monstrosity it used to be, they actually listen to customers now and do things right, give them another chanceReply